The present invention relates to a polarizer capable of light amplification.
Conventional polarizers are typically in sheet form or made of calcite (e.g., Glan-Taylor prisms).
The conventional polarizers of these types extract part of the incident light to obtain desired linear polarization, so they inevitably involve the problem of a light loss.
In the case of handling an output of a photodetector which detects linearly polarized light provided from a conventional polarizer, if the noise is mainly a shot noise of the photodetector, the polarizer reduces the light intensity and will deteriorate the S/N ratio of the photodetector's output. Therefore, it is required to take special care in dealing with the light emerging from the polarizer.